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Thursday, 28 November 2013

I love contrast in quilting, so to go with the all-over-the-place, different-size bubbles, I decided on a parallel grid pattern. I didn't want the pattern to be too ridgid, so left out every 3rd line, ending up with 2" - 1" - 2" - 1" etc. in between quilt lines. I simply used masking tape to mark the quilt lines and quilted along either side of the tape.

Using the tape was much easier than marking all the lines with a pen and then having to get rid of the markings later. The method uses up a lot of masking tape, but I simply reused small bits that I had left over from taping quilt backings to the floor for basting. After a while, these bits aren't strong enough anymore to hold the quilt backing to the floor (too much fuzz collects on them), but they're fine to string together for marking a quilt line...

Whenever possible, I simply lifted the needle and foot and moved across to the next seam without cutting the thread. This reduces the chance of thread-ends balling up or getting tangled when starting a new quilt line with loose thread ends.

View from the under side, all finished and squared up.

And the front...

Once all three parts are ready, I will decide on the binding colour... whether to match each quilt or use the same colour to link the 3 parts together...

Sunday, 24 November 2013

Next comes Part B. I decided to do bubbles in the circles this time. The plan is to use different quilting styles and combinations on each part of the wall-hanging.

The bubbles pattern is one of my favourite free-motion quilting patterns. Especially on a small section such as this, it's a lot of effect for relatively little work.

I want to bounce on these!

A little oopsie-daisy happened about 5 seconds into free-motion quilting. I missed a pin, it snuck up from behind the foot and caught me so unawares that I quilted right over it. Unfortunately in such a way (as you can see) that I couldn't simply fiddle the needle out. What a pain to have to cut the threat after 5 cm of quilting! But hey, I'm glad my needle didn't break when it hit the pin...

Wednesday, 20 November 2013

This part of the three-part wall hanging has been done for a while. I tried to use thread and quilting to make the 3/4 circles look like almost full circles, fading the clearly delineated missing quarter into the background. However, short of quilting that part of the quilt into a solid brick, I gave up trying. There was just too much light-dark contrast to bridge, and it may have needed fabric paint or something, and I'm not really interested in trying that...

Here is the back, you can see what I mean about trying to soften the transition from background fabric to circle fabric.